2 April 07
Opening Day
None of our teams won today (the Giants open tomorrow), but the new season is underway! In this thread I learned that Detroit Tigers broadcasting great Ernie Harwell would open up the new baseball year with a verse from the Song of Songs:
For the autumn has passed and the rain is over and gone. The flowers are seen in the country, the season of the songbird arrived, and the sound of the turtle-dove is heard in our land.
8 December 06
Twenty-Seven
![Graph of RC [Runs Created] with age](http://www.magpienest.org/images/165.jpg "Graph of RC [Runs Created] with age")
Brian Sabean, the general manager of the San Francisco Giants, has got to go. Now that we’re well into the off-season, I’ve been dabbling in a bit of sabermetrics — what can I learn from analyzing a database of player statistics that goes back to 1871. As something of a warmup, I started to look at player performance as a function of age. After concluding I needed to look at a single cohort of ballplayers, I chose all batters who were born in 1957 (all of whom have stopped playing by now).
The graph at left is a doubly-averaged concoction. The y-axis measures Runs Created, which is an estimate of the total number of runs that a batter contributes to the team over the course of the season. What I did to produce the graph was to plot for each of the batters in my cohort RC against age and then fit a linear regression model with a quadratic term against the plot. This model generates a graph that is an upside-down parabola, the maximum of it falling at the age of the batter’s peak performance. I then took the equations for the entire set of batters, and averaged their coefficients together in turn, to produce the graph here, which is a composite look at the batting performance across the entire cohort.
The peak of the graph is at age twenty-seven. After I did my little analysis, I was gratified to read that Bill James came up with exactly that value for age of peak performance twenty-five years ago. Beyond that, players start going downhill, or as Bill James put it: “most players are declining by age 30; all players are declining by age 33.”
As Steven Rubio has pointed out, the San Francisco Giants aren’t exactly in a youth movement. This off-season they have so far signed or re-signed Ray Durham (age 35), Dave Roberts (age 34), Rich Aurilia (age 35), Bengie Molina (age 32), Pedro Feliz (age 31), the pitcher Steve Kline (age 34) and of course Barry Bonds (age 42). Sigh. With that lineup, the Giants’ winning ways (this past season their record was 76 and 85, 11.5 games out of first place in the division) are surely going to continue. It’s not even 2007 yet, and my hopes for next season are pretty dim.
7 November 06
Fremont A's?
The Oakland A’s seem eager to move about 20 miles to Fremont, of all places. They are expected to announce next week their intention to acquire the rights to a 143 acre tract currently leased by Cisco Systems.
The A’s would rather move to downtown San Jose, but this is currently politically infeasible, and as columnist Ray Ratto explains, moving to Fremont is a potentially horrific mistake, a third-best alternative chosen simply because A’s managing partner Lew Wolff is in a hurry to be somewhere else. The Oakland Network Associates McAffee Coliseum despite its great many faults as least has the virtue of being on the BART line; the proposed new site would be six miles from the southernmost BART station, off the worst freeway with the most godawful traffic in Northern California, I-880. There are a lot of peeved A’s fans in this thread here.
28 October 06
End Of Season
The Cardinals won the World Series last night 4 games to 1. The Tigers, who were dominant in the playoffs, lost their stride, maybe as a result of the six days they had off between the end of the playoffs and the start of the World Series. We were rooting for the Tigers—the story of their rise from near-record futility in 2003 to league champion this year is a heartening one. But the Cardinals are a good and worthy team, with a cadre of some very talented players, and I’m not dismayed to see them win. I’ve liked their manager Tony La Russa since his days with the A’s, especially since he has a strong commitment to companion animal welfare (he started the East Bay-based Animal Rescue Foundation after rescuing and trying to find a home for a stray cat that ran onto the field during an A’s-Yankees game.) And it’s fun to see somebody of my stature win the series MVP—the Cards’ shortshop David Eckstein who seems to need all-out effort to make the throw to first base. A stout heart still counts for a lot.
The offseason brings two pastimes, following the moves as teams rearrange themselves for next year, and catching up on baseball and the arts. The San Francisco Giants have already hired a new manager, snatching Bruce Bochy away from the Padres, and seem likely to part ways with Barry Bonds. If the latter happens I’ll be glad. As for baseball in film and literature—it’s high time we finished watching the Ken Burns baseball series!
20 October 06
Back In 1934
The World Series begins this weekend, the St. Louis Cardinals taking on the Detroit Tigers. The teams have met twice before in the World Series, once in 1968, and once in 1934.
The 1934 series went the full seven games, the Cardinals winning 4 games to 3. The last game turned out to be a laugher, the Cardinals winning 11-0 behind the pitching of Dizzy Dean. It was a tense contest for all of two innings. In the top of the 3rd, all hell breaks loose, and the Cardinals bring up 13 batters to the plate, scoring 7 runs, Dizzy Dean helping his own cause with a double and a single. The Tigers went through four pitchers in the inning.
More antics were to come at the top of the 6th inning. The Cards’ Joe Medwick slid hard into third base following his triple, and got into a tiff with the third baseman. Whe Medwick took the field at the bottom of the inning the Detroit fans started pelting him with fruit, vegetables, and anything else they could throw. By order of the Commissioner, Medwick was removed from the game for his own safety. Even with their best hitter thus taken out, the Cards had no trouble finishing off the Tigers. Dizzy Dean was the MVP of the series, winning two games, and losing one.
10 October 06
Advantage Tigers
The lesson of their last three games seems to be don’t give up much of a lead to the Detroit Tigers, because their pitching will make it very tough to catch up. We watched most of tonight’s game over at Barbara’s; when I left from work to go over there Barry Zito of the Oakland A’s seemed to be very much in command. But he faltered at the end of the 3rd inning, giving up a home run to Brandon Inge, and by the time I arrived it was 2-0 Tigers. The Tigers picked up 3 more runs to make it 5-0 in the 4th inning, knocking Zito out of the game. The Tigers held on to win it 5-1.
The Tigers thus take the first game of the seven-game series on the road. Their lead is hardly insurmountable, but if the rest of the Tigers’ starting rotation pitches like they did against the Yankees, the A’s have their work cut out for them.
8 October 06
Past the Scary Part
Now that the Yankees have been eliminated from the rest of the postseason, we can relax and enjoy all the remaining games. Tuesday the American League Championship Series kicks off in Oakland as the A’s take on the Detroit Tigers. I’m glad this matchup is taking place now rather than in the Division Series just completed. I’d like to see the A’s in the World Series, but will still be happy if the Tigers go instead. No predictions—the series is definitely a toss-up.
7 October 06
Native Plants and Gopher Cages
Today was all about finding California native plants to fill out my herb garden. I went to the Arboretum Plant Sale and got some great finds. We drove over to Grass Valley to the Peaceful Valley Organic Farm and Garden Supply Store, which was a bit like going to another universe. Gopher cages are for my herbs, but the California fuchsia, currants, and penstemons are on their own.
The Tigers beat the Yankees, we heard over the radio all day. The Cal Bears are beating Oregon. This is the backdrop of the day…
2 October 06
Closing Day
The baseball season ended yesterday. Most noteworthy was the collapse of the Detroit Tigers, who after leading their division the entire season, relinquished first place in the last game of the season to the resurgent Minnesota Twins. I’ve been rooting for the Tigers all along this year, since three or so years ago they barely avoided setting the record for worst season ever in all of baseball history.
The Tigers will still be in the playoffs as the American League wild card. The good news is they will not be playing the Oakland A’s in the first matchup of the playoffs, thus leading to a personal rooting conflict. The bad news is they have to play the Yankees straight away, which for a slumping team will be a challenge. Go you Tigers!
I’m off to Colorado for a business trip this week, but this means I’ll get to watch some of the playoffs on the telly.
4 August 06
Life In Lower Divisions
We just went to see the River Cats rout the Memphis Redbirds 15-1. Doc Rock, up here for a brief visit, went to the game with us; we picked her up at the airport and went straight to the ballpark. She’s never been to a minor league game before, and had a good baseball experience tonight. Minor league games have an enchanting mixture of occasional high-caliber play and constant between-inning campiness. There is also the undercurrent of the stories of the careers of the players: who is bound for stardom in a year or two, and who is on their way down, or out.
It’s been almost four weeks now since the end of the World Cup and I am still keen on following soccer. I’ve read three books on the sport since then—National Pastime, a comparison of the business aspects of both baseball and soccer, Fever Pitch, the classic account of an obsessed Arsenal fan in London, which eventually turned into a movie about a Red Sox fan, and The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, about a team in a tiny village in the Abruzzo region that manages to get promoted to the second-tier league in Italy one year. We’re visiting Europe in several weeks and I might just take myself to a match to find out what the sport is really all about. Not the top-flight teams—it’s too hard and expensive to get tickets for those matches—but rather the middling teams. It will be very different from sport over here, but how?